


States of Lesser Grace

by KlayterMcCabe



Category: Star Wars Episode VII: The Force Awakens (2015)
Genre: Gen, M/M, droid!Hux
Language: English
Status: In-Progress
Published: 2016-02-19
Updated: 2016-03-07
Packaged: 2018-05-21 22:19:50
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 3
Words: 3,961
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/6060112
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/KlayterMcCabe/pseuds/KlayterMcCabe
Summary: <blockquote class="userstuff">
              <p>Kink meme fill about droid!Hux that grew on me after someone made a comment about using the Force to mind probe Deep Dream. "But Hux cared, of course. It kept painstakingly abreast of general relevant technologies, as well as the work being done in the particular lab that had created it. It didn't want to be human, but it understood that the best way to prove its value to humans was to be as like them as possible."</p>
            </blockquote>





	1. General

Something was wrong with General Hux. Ren had certain expectations about the minds of military men: keen edges and sharp organization, orderly consciousnesses underpinned by well-repressed sentimentality or pedestrian depravity. Even the best of the Knights of Rens' tacticians shared a keen sense of observation and a certain personal distance, quite in line with Hux's demeanor.

But inside his head, Hux was more an acid trip than an orderly file cabinet.

No matter how focused he was on a task, underneath his sense of himself he played a constant game of free association, utterly arbitrary in both its connections and emphases.

While he engaged with the slow grind of bureaucracy, he could simultaneously experience a kind of waking dream in which certain words or phrases triggered vast shifts in his consciousness. The face of someone speaking might initiate a waterfall of images of that face, from previous meetings and various angles, creating a large-scale composite that was both more and less accurate a representation than the actual person in front of him.

Shows of emotion—Hux's were apparently limited to displeasure, impatience, outrage, and apprehension—were quite divorced from his mental state, and it was only by mistake that Ren realized they were triggered as much by other people's attitudes as by spoken words. His own anger and casual disregard for Hux's rules frequently produced outrage; visible cringing caused impatience; generally only Snoke was capable of producing apprehension. ("Displeased" seemed his default mode.)

Once, returning to the _Finalizer_ exhausted after a grueling failure, Ren had lacked the energy even to respond to Hux's inquiries with his usual scorn, and had said in a flat voice:

"I failed. They're blocking our sensors, and the Force was inadequate compensation."

Instead of with Hux's usual lemon-sucking contempt, Ren's neutrality had been met in kind. "Yes," Hux said simply. "I'll see what our engineers can do."

Further experiment had yielded similar results: Hux's emotional responses had to be triggered by specific stimuli or they failed to appear.

"Like a goddamned lab rat," Ren had muttered to himself. "Learning the rules without understanding them."

_Like a machine teaching itself to think._

And once he'd had the idea, it was impossible to let go.

The massive computer systems that ran the _Finalizer_ had in no way achieved sentience, but there was a thrum that still represented them in the Force, their sheer power rendering them real. Doids registered more as insects; simplistic and predictable in their motivations and actions. There was not so much a _mind_ to read as a flowchart of limited possibilities. Hux was not an insect, nor a noise, nor a flowchart. And yet there was something of all of those things in him, magnified until it could achieve some approximation of human complexity.

Ren confronted Snoke after a meeting where he'd been in clear favor and Hux, suffering serious construction setbacks, was dismissed early.

"The General isn't..." he said slowly.

"You certainly aren't about to make excuses on his behalf," Snoke said, a slow smile curling his outsized face. The Supreme Leader did this occasionally, making non-sequiturs that were always insulting in their implications. They were meant to indicate his deep connection to the Force, where he swam in currents beyond Ren's perception. Yet, on occasion, Ren had wondered if they were no more than the petty manipulations they appeared.

"The General isn't a human being," Ren said finally.

Snoke's smile now was as close to sincere as it ever was. "Have you only just noticed?"

"I felt an... absence." Ren hesitated, then decided he was merely flattering himself that Snoke wasn't already intimate with his every worst idea. "I thought he was merely a sociopath, or perhaps that he had some limited abilities to shield himself from the Force."

"I suppose both of these things are true, in their way. Hux is an experiment that's succeeded quite beyond what we dared to hope."

Ren waited, but Snoke offered no additional details.

"I shouldn't think it would matter what Hux is," Snoke added, "except to your pride."

Yet as he spoke, the opposite became true: Ren could see his own outbursts now as a symptom of his essential humanity rather than an inability to control himself.

000

Ren waited until this knowledge had settled in, probing at Hux's "mind" more freely now that he knew the man—droid?—was incapable of discerning these intrusions. What finally drew him to Hux's quarters was wondering whether it slept, or pretended to sleep.

Hux answered its door in full uniform, with none of the disarray or exhaustion Ren might have expected from a human being interrupted in the middle of the night. It raised one eyebrow but said nothing, and after a moment stepped aside to let Ren into its rooms.

"Snoke told me what you are," Ren said, when the door slid closed behind him.

Hux blinked.

Ren waited for a denial.

As he waited he realized that Hux blinked at exact intervals.

"Now that I know to look for it," said Ren, "I can't believe it isn't common knowledge."

Hux sat down at the desk, posture perfect. "I believe it would be poor for morale, for the Stormtroopers to realize that their military commands were shaped by algorithms rather than..." it paused, pursing its lips, and as a moue of slight distaste came over its face, Ren had to consider the possibility that Hux was capable of spontaneous emotional displays after all. "...the random neural impulses that your kind value so highly."

Ren drifted towards him, looming slightly. "And you aren't afraid of what I could do with this knowledge?"

Hux waved him away with one hand. "I represent a great deal of time and resources expended on Snoke's personal orders. You aren't in a position to threaten me without bringing devastating reprisals down on yourself."

Ren leaned down towards it, bringing his mask quite close to Hux's face. It was not lost on him that, to a casual observer, he would appear the more artificial of the two. "And you think I'm a man afraid of reprisals?"

"I think the Dark Side is composed of fear and anger and hatred, and that it is the former of these emotions that has provided your primary impetus in pursuing the latter two."

Ren stepped back. It was the blank affect with which they were delivered as much as the words themselves that undid him.

"Of course, I will continue to publicly denigrate your powers as a Force user," Hux continued, in the same neutral voice. "It gives you ample opportunity to demonstrate the Force before troops who might be otherwise inclined to doubt, and Snoke has found you a more effective public figure when you have a foil against whom to rail."

"A fucking _droid_ to rail against," Ren snapped out.

"I've found that word inadequate to convey my capabilities."

Ren was almost too irritated to ask, but of course he hadn't become the person he had by denying his own impulses. "All right," he said softly. "What word do you use?"

The slight smile that broke across Hux's face looked terribly human. "I prefer the word 'General.'"


	2. Monster

"You _like_ doing that," Ren said, the first time he watched Hux orate in front of an audience of thousands.

It nodded.

Ren closed his eyes and tapped at Hux's thoughts. There was no sense of what he would have called "pleasure" in another human.

" _Can_ you like things?" he asked.

They were in Hux's quarters, the immaculacy of which was made more bearable by its lack of human needs and their associated mess. Learning that Hux was a machine had made Ren more comfortable with it, not less. "Competition" between them was no longer necessary—as the only person in the room, Ren had already won. He could even view it as a nominal ally now; the only other being on the ship who had faced both the horrors of Snoke's anger and the stress of his approval.

"I find great satisfaction in performing a task competently," said Hux. But behind its bland tone was something insincere, and Ren tugged this thread.

"You're lying," he said, and took pleasure in his own surprise. It was rare for anyone he'd even briefly combed through to surprise him, much less anyone he'd spent as much time exploring as he had Hux. "But I'm not quite sure what you're lying about."

Hux merely inclined its head. Long stretches of silence didn't bother it, and when no one was there to observe it but Ren, Hux often remained quite motionless for uncomfortably long periods. Lately it had even ceased to pretend to breathe, a tic that had disconcerted Ren until he pinpointed what had changed.

"I like it when they all have to look at me," Hux said finally. "A thousand pairs of eyes watching, and I can fool all of them. They are obligated to obey me." It paused for so long that Ren assumed it was finished; indeed he was surprised Hux had volunteered so much at all.

"My initial design did not involve a human appearance," it said finally. "Tactical utility only. I have long transcended those nascent limitations, but… it pleases me, to be reminded that I have done so."

Ren's smirk was touched with recognition, and he was grateful the mask hid his expression. "You're proud of yourself," he said, not bothering to conceal the edge of laughter from his voice. He knew, even as he used this tone, the exact response it would trigger, and indeed Hux's lip curled with the appearance of rancor.

"I have accumulated in my brief existence an ample number of accomplishments to justify pride." It flicked its eyes up and down Ren's form. "Which is more than I can say for Snoke's dog, whose most notable act was a _massacre of children_ —"

"Stop," said Ren flatly, surprised for a second time, now by the level of vitriol his light jab had inspired.

Hux stopped.

"That presentation of anger was disproportionate," said Ren. "It would have looked... strange, had you miscalculated before an audience."

"We would never speak this way before an audience."

Ren went into Hux's side-cabinet, which was well-stocked with liquor despite Hux's abstention. There was an unpleasant weight in his chest.

"I..."

Ren poured himself a drink as Hux hesitated. He could feel no technical glitch in Hux's mind responsible for its sudden inarticulateness.

"I answered your query with an unnecessary level of detail, and did not feel your mockery was an appropriate response."

Ren finished a shot and then abandoned both the glass and the bottle on the counter. "I'm leaving," he announced. Hux watched him silently. When it didn't ask for an explanation, Ren abandoned Hux's quarters to stalk the halls.

Technology had reached the point, apparently, where a droid could accuse him of hurting its feelings.

000

The tenacity of his own weakness meant that Ren had spent long hours preparing for the annihilation of the Hosnian system. The destruction of Alderaan was a legendary event in galactic history; most Force-users living at the time had experienced it on some level; enough of them had written about it that there were whole anthologies of essays with no greater overriding theme than "where I was when Alderaan was destroyed," though they couched their experiences in more poetic terms.

This would be greater.

A cause for celebration, of course. Yet Ren was not unaware—was never unaware—of his personal failures, hesitations great and small brought about by his lack of faith in the Dark Side.

He was afraid not of the destruction of the Hosnian system itself, but that he would experience regret as it burned. So he had hardened his heart as he had hardened his body, using physical pain to drown out purely mental discomforts, until he was exhausted and alternately raw and numb.

When it came time to gather for the demonstration, Ren was empty, a mere vessel through which the Force could express its will. The ambient excitement and nervousness of everyone present—from the lowliest Stormtrooper to Hux's direct subordinates—textured the air so thoroughly that it was palpable even to the least Force-sensitive among them. Hux itself was a void, as it had been when they first met and Ren mentally dismissed it as a zealous First Order sociopath.

Hux gave the order, and they waited.

The entire planet shuddered as Starkiller Base fired.

Lights on the bridge and for several miles around were extinguished, so that they could watch as their lasers cut across the void of space.

For just a moment, Ren closed his eyes.

Though the phantom energy would cross hyperspace and destroy the Hosnian system within the hour, it would be days before light from the explosion was visible in their sky.

The lights came back up and men made work for themselves as they waited for the first reports of destruction to file in.

Hux stood next to him, and Ren dipped into its thoughts as a reprieve from the tension of waiting.

Hux, for the first time Ren had ever seen it do so, was focused entirely on one thing. The vibration of Starkiller Base as they fired. The flash of red light. The orbital mechanics equations that had determined their aim. Meticulously scaled blueprints overlaid with dense paragraphs of chemical engineering and stats on the quintessence containment unit. Its concentration was so intense it was almost an audible thrum. It was what Hux had felt after its speech, magnified, all-consuming.

Pride.

Ren turned his head and opened his mouth to speak, then found that he had nothing to say. Still, Hux tilted its head and waited.

Ren looked back to their bridge officers.

"This is what we have transcended," Hux whispered, too close to his ear. "Now the whole galaxy will see us. They will _all_ be obligated to obey."

Since learning that Hux was a droid, Ren had imagined he could hear a tinny note in its voice, something artificial to give it away. In the whisper there was nothing; no artificial sound, no heat in its breath, no smell.

"To obey the Supreme Leader," Ren added, at a regular volume, not caring that nearby officers would overhear.

"Yes," said Hux, snapping back into parade rest. "Of course."

As the first wave of deaths began to wash over him, the last gasps of billions abruptly silenced, Hux still thrummed with pride beside him.

And then Ren thought the thought it had been inevitable he would think, one Snoke had no doubt had addressed to him hundreds of times, one that had perhaps been said to him about Kylo Ren himself:

You have created a monster.

**Notes for the Chapter:**

> Yeah I saw this movie twice in December but I don't really remember if they fired off the superweapon right after Hux's Nazi speech or if they waited a while or what, so I'm just going with all-the-appropriate-military-personnel-watched-from-the-bridge-of-Starkiller-Base. WHERE'S THE BRIDGE OF A PLANET? I dunno, bros. I dunno.


	3. Failure

After Ren's disastrous fight with the scavenger and FN-2187, Hux showed up personally to retrieve him, with a squad of Stormtroopers and an expression on its face Ren had never seen before.

"It's good you aren't dead," said Hux, voice utterly neutral, and Ren laughed, not sure whether he agreed. The laughter hurt him, and he clung to the pain, using it to focus. He felt wide open—the physical wounds, the memory of the Scavenger inside his head, the death of Han Solo like a vast sea only just held back by a faltering dam.

"Snoke wishes to see you," Hux added, and then said nothing else. It sat without moving, in the stiff fashion Ren had become accustomed to seeing only when they were alone.

The Stormtroopers moved with their usual efficiency, but they were weighed down so heavily by fear and uncertainty that Ren couldn't escape the taint of it. A loss of this magnitude was unprecedented in the First Order's admittedly brief military history; he was momentarily amused by the thought of the reconditioning stations being overwhelmed with PTSD and mass survivor's guilt. That was the advantage of a clone army, of course: if you could find just one soldier immune to such psychological weaknesses, you could have a whole army of them. If Hux were still a person, it would be the kind of thought he'd hold onto, to needle him with later.

But Hux wasn't a person, never had been, and Ren felt too tired at the moment for such pettiness.

He wanted to move past the pain of his injuries, to enter the deep numbness of meditation, but it was in this state that he was most receptive to Snoke, and Ren was ill-prepared to deal with his master's rage and disappointment.

 _You aren't breathing_.

He put the words directly into Hux's head, and watched as Hux sat straight up, blinking in a rather human fashion. Ren wondered how Hux received this feedback: as audible words, like sentient beings did, or in some dull programmer's code?

He closed his eyes. In the darkness he felt not the peace of the Dark Side's wild storms but a yawning emptiness, a great void that would swallow him up as it had swallowed his father.

As it had swallowed Han Solo.

Hux had resumed its humanesque subroutine, though Ren doubted the Stormtroopers were in any shape to notice its personal eccentricities. Internally Hux was whirling, running potential scenario analyses within a wide range of probabilities, from situations with a 91% chance of actually occurring to myriad simulations with what were functionally zero odds. As Ren watched, it again froze and ceased to pretend to breathe, shedding all extraneous power usage in pursuit of these fantasies about real world outcomes. A rather high number of them resulted in Hux being decommissioned and replaced.

 _Oh_ , Ren thought, in the privacy of his own mind. _You're afraid to die_.

Han Solo had not really had time to be afraid; he had died with hope, believing that his poor dead son was reaching out to him. At the time, Ren thought this a small mercy.

Ren was not afraid to die. Even Snoke, privy to the furthest reaches of his mind, understood this to be one of Ren's personal truths. He would join the Force when he passed, a small piece of the greatest power in the universe.

Han Solo, without the least bit of force sensitivity, had simply died.

When Hux was decommissioned, he would also cease to be.

"You're a valuable resource," Ren said out loud. "As you've repeatedly reminded me. Snoke isn't fond of waste."

Hux paused multiple simulations to turn and answer him. "As an investment, I fall several orders of magnitude short of Starkiller Base."

It looked at the Stormtroopers present and stopped talking, lips pressed into a thin line. Ren had an easy enough time following the trail of what else it might have said: the same engineers who had made it continued working, perpetually refining their designs and applying technological advances as they came along. The next version of Hux would be more powerful, capable of greater speed, with a more complex artificial neural network and vat-grown (but quite real) human skin.

Ren was caught for a moment on this last detail: who in the world would care about the texture of a droid's skin?

But Hux cared, of course. It kept painstakingly abreast of general relevant technologies, as well as the work being done in the particular lab that had created it. It didn't want to be human, but it understood that the best way to prove its value to humans was to be as like them as possible.

 _Well_ , Ren thought, _you've certainly fucked that up._ He didn't bother to project this thought; Hux had already turned its full attention back to its simulations.

This was its version of panic, Ren realized.

"What itineration are you?" he asked out loud, curious for the first time.

Hux didn't answer. As he watched, it slumped slightly, and its mind began paring down operations before going quiet.

"Leave us," he snapped to the remaining Stormtroopers. Hux did not close its eyes, and without the lines made by its perpetual expressions of dissatisfaction, it looked both quite young and quite dead.

"Do not—" Ren started to say, and swallowed the rest of the words. _Do not leave me to face Snoke alone for this failure_. _Do not be another dead thing whose weight I have to carry_.

He stood over Hux, dripping blood first onto the floor, then onto Hux's uniform.

He could trace this weakness for droids to his parents, and even to Vader himself. Growing up, Threepio had fed him on joyous anecdotes about Anakin Skywalker as a child. From Ren's parents, stories about Anakin were always tragedies and distortions; it was only Threepio who could completely compartmentalize his love of Anakin and his distaste for Vader, so that the boy who made him in the desert was always a hero, and the man who destroyed Alderaan was a villain right up until his death.

Growing up, he had reached for Threepio's shining golden hand almost as often as he had reached for Chewie's massive furry one.

Stop.

Kylo Ren was wide open. It had not been a lie when he told Han Solo that he was torn apart.

"Do not," he repeated, bringing his face low and very close to Hux's.

He knew where Threepio's manual power switch was, but even if Hux was likewise engineered, it would have to be concealed. He undid the three hook-and-eye closures fastening its high collar, then traced his fingers along the back of its neck. Hux was room temperature, and through the gloves the texture of its skin felt quite normal.

Hux blinked once and then sat up straight, pushing Ren away and standing in one jerky motion.

"What—" it said.

"What did you do?" Ren asked, sitting back down and affecting disinterest.

Hux scanned the room for Stormtroopers, then sat an arm's length away from Ren.

"I rebooted. The problems at hand require my full attention, and I did not feel I was at peak performance."

Maybe Snoke had even understood Ren's fondness for droids, something he would have been unable himself to articulate. Droids were clean, free of the baggage of human beings. You could trust them the way you could never trust the whims of sentient creatures, no matter what words they used to make their whims seem grand.

"You require medical attention," it added.

Ren nodded. Neither of them made any move to call the Stormtroopers back in.

 _I don't want you to be decommissioned_ , he thought, but did not bother to say. Such sentiment was only a whim, his own no grander than anyone else's. If Snoke wanted Hux decommissioned, it would be done.

Hux's gaze flashed from the blood on the floor to the blood on its uniform, and then it brought one hand up to its throat.

"Whether or not you value your body enough to call for medical is beyond my concern, but this mess is unnecessary. Once again, your sense of personal drama is creating messes that other people will be responsible for cleaning."

The sour prissiness of its tone made something in Ren fall into place. He was not wide open. He was not being torn apart. He was a hero of the Dark Side, and he would wear his pain and doubt as armor, so that the next time he faced that desert rat, he would be strong enough to crush her.

Hux refastened the hooks-and-eyes at its collar without commenting on their state. It walked out and returned with a medical droid, and Ren submitted to its care with minimal complaining. He acquiesced almost gratefully when it administered a sedative. _I'll reboot_ , he thought, with the looping euphoria that immediately proceeded sleep. _When I come back, I'll be at peak performance_.

When he came back, he would face Snoke.

**Author's Note:**

> original prompt, discussion, and fill available here for your perusal:
> 
> https://tfa-kink.dreamwidth.org/2821.html?thread=5036549#cmt5036549


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